Alignment In Business Quotes

Fostering a thriving board is akin to orchestrating a symphony of aligned vision, shared success, and measurable progress.

A vision alone ain’t enough. To truly thrive, the board must also align on a concrete definition of success. This involves a meticulous process of identifying key performance indicators (KPIs), setting SMART goals, and establishing a robust framework for measuring progress.

Investors, creditors, and regulatory bodies rely on financial statements to make informed decisions. When internal metrics align with recognized standards, it enhances the credibility of your financial reports, fostering trust among these stakeholders.

To make good business decisions, you need to be routinely extracting actionable data from the businesses processes. Analyzing the data and organizing it in alignment with the businesses goals will allow for greater clarity in making decisions.

Corporate governance involves its fair share of differing investor expectations, but focusing on long-term value creation aligns interests.

Effective corporate governance ensures that the vision and strategy are aligned, with the board of directors playing a crucial role in defining the vision and overseeing the development and execution of the strategy.

It's best to magnetize your business to specific kinds of customers; customers that are aligned with the businesses goals, purpose, and values. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.

Effective board governance hinges on designing management compensation structures that align with long-term goals.

A successful blitz requires a well-thought-out strategy and flawless execution. Similarly, effective corporate governance involves developing and implementing sound strategies that align with the company's goals and values.

Climate intelligence enables action-oriented, climate-aligned decisions to mitigate risks, build resilient adaptation, and identify emerging opportunities.

With limited accountability, misaligned incentives, and lagging legislation, today’s governance systems and structures do not align with the sustainability of humanity or the planet that hosts us.

Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.

When it comes to getting a job or client, congruent value is aligning the employer's need with your value add.

We want to maintain alignment with a way of thinking about business from a value adding perspective.

When companies genuinely commit to CSR, they signal to their stakeholders that their values align with broader societal concerns.

When we apply IP licensing at scale in an exclusive system and in alignment with permaculture principles, we give businesses in the network a strategic advantage while helping the world transition to a better state of being.

As managers, we should hire people whose values align with the values of the company, and then trust them to do their job well. If you have to micromanage an employee, one of you isn't a fit for the company.

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.

there cannot be alignment deeper in the organization, even when employees want to cooperate, if the leaders at the top aren’t in lockstep with one another

You want your target market and your capabilities to be completely in alignment.

The most dangerous unhappy people I’ve met are those who are both extremely ambitious and extremely lazy. What this combination produces is envy, which is a deadly sin that will make your life a living hell. These are people who think big and want to do something big, but they’re not willing to put in the work to earn it. They’ll cheat. They’ll throw you under the bus. They’re constantly looking for shortcuts. And if someone else has what they want, it eats away at their very soul. If someone is winning at a higher level than you are, either lower your expectations to match your work ethic or increase your work ethic to exceed your expectations. If you do neither, you’ll be miserable. What it all boils down to is that alignment is the key to fulfillment

If you create and market a product or service through a business that is in alignment with your personality, capitalizes on your history, incorporates your experiences, harnesses your talents, optimizes your strengths, complements your weaknesses, honors your life's purpose, and moves you towards the conquest of your own fears, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that anyone in this or any other universe can offer the same value that you do!

A business is in alignment if it’s employees feel a sense of fulfillment from working for the business and its customers feel a sense of fulfillment from buying from the business. In this case, fulfillment is in both the exhale and the inhale of the businesses activity. And this cycle of fulfillment will lead to sales and profits.

Silence can bring us into alignment with our thoughts and feelings and help us to hear the quiet spiritual voice of our intuition.

Investing is like Yoga. Body, mind and soul have to be aligned.

every line of business and function should have a strategy—one that aligns with the strategy of the company overall and decides where to play and how to win specifically for its context.

It's crucial for companies to identify the specific regulatory bodies that apply to their business and ensure their internal financial metrics align with the relevant reporting standards.

The Permaculture Economics paradigm shift prioritizes well-being over growth, aligning with humanity's true needs. Growth is still extremely important, just not more important than well-being.

Technology consultancies that design and sell these advanced AI systems may have difficulty being objective about the potential job displacement caused by those very tools. - Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable Wold

Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

Payton “Sin” Sinclair was an unapologetic people-watcher. As a sports consultant, working with some of the biggest and most recognizable athletes in sports and business, he had to be able to read the smallest nuances of others. That ability was just one of the unique attributes that set him apart from the competition and made him the go-to person when corporations wanted to align themselves with the top professional athletes in the country.

You don’t get many second chances in this world.  Don’t turn your back on them.  You don’t get many true loves.  Embrace the ones in your life and set your fears aside.  You only get two parents.  Forgive them.  Not every business in this country will willingly hand you a paycheck.  Do your work with presence.  And if the stars align and the heavens deem your art acceptable enough for an audience, love every new friend and never put ads on your website.

When you are truly aligned with virtue, there is no sense of arrogance, righteousness, or superiority. When you are truly aligned with virtue, a harmony pervades. VIII.

Every entrepreneur has a gift around which their business and life align with their brand.

There are huge business opportunities in geoengineering, if it's done in alignment with permaculture principles. And big climate change problems can be solved in the process.

In saying no to anything that doesn’t fit, you leave room to say yes to those rare opportunities that do fit—opportunities that align with the values and ideas of your business.

Alignment is a force multiplier.

Understanding the unique needs of each business is crucial in tailoring financial solutions that align with their objectives. It’s never a one size fits all when it comes to financing.

It is far better to have 10,000 Facebook friends who are in the same category or aligned with your values or a common inter- est than 100,000 random robot followers from around the world.

Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types—stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem—and three core team interaction modes—collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating.

Companies should monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) because they provide critical insights into the health and success of the business. Regular KPI tracking helps companies make data-driven decisions, identify areas for improvement, and stay aligned with their strategic goals, ultimately contributing to sustained growth and profitability.

The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. … Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life. People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge. Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.

It’s important for employees to be employed in the roles where they are most productive. No matter how excellent someone is, if they are tasked with doing things that don’t align with their excellence, they will produce mediocre results at best.

It’s not just about having the right people in the company. It’s about having the right people in the right places. You don’t want your whales climbing mountains or your eagles swimming in the ocean so to speak. No matter how excellent someone is, if they are tasked with doing things that don’t align with their excellence, they will produce mediocre results at best.

A business's purpose should be aligned with adding a certain kind of value: meeting certain kinds of needs, solving certain kinds of problems, and fulfilling certain kinds of desires. And when the business is doing those things, the business itself and everyone it feels a sense of fulfillment.

What it all boils down to is that alignment is the key to fulfillment. Keep these things in mind: Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.

Trump’s pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the Order of Friendship. National security adviser? Michael Flynn, Putin’s dinner companion and a beneficiary of undeclared Russian fees. Campaign manager? Paul Manafort, longtime confidant to ex-Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, an alleged Moscow asset who gave documents to Putin’s spies. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Michael Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Felix Sater, son of a Russian American mafia boss. And other personalities, too. It was almost as if Putin had played a role in naming Trump’s cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, had done the choosing. But the constellation of individuals, and their immaculate alignment with Russian interests, formed a discernible pattern, like stars against a clear night sky. A pattern of collusion.

Companies should consider merger and acquisition (M&A) opportunities carefully because these strategic moves can have a significant impact on their operations and financial health. Thorough evaluation helps mitigate risks, ensure alignment with business objectives, and maximize the potential benefits, ultimately leading to successful integration and growth.

Self-governing cultures both inspire alignment and eject elements that don't fit in.

The team needs to learn how to work together, align around the right imperatives, and develop their unique chemistry.

Employees should be very clear about the companies values. And more importantly, employee values should align with company values.

The devil’s in the details!

Hiring is about alignment, personality, culture, heart, and work ethic.

When we align our goals with our plans, we plug in our focus and willpower to make it work.

The Tech Humanist mindset is about aligning your business goals with broader human goals so that the more you succeed, the more you bring humanity with you.

the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground. Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

Ultimately it boils down to a simple equation: income minus expenses equals profit. There are certain ways of being that maximize or minimize income. There are certain ways of being that maximize or minimize expenses. Administration done well is about aligning the business with the ways of being which maximize income, and the ways of being which minimize expenses.

The purpose of a platform team is to enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy. The stream-aligned team maintains full ownership of building, running, and fixing their application in production. The platform team provides internal services to reduce the cognitive load that would be required from stream-aligned teams to develop these underlying services.

The rationales for centralized, to-down decision making - control, direction, and compliance - melts away when individuals are tightly aligned with the company's values and goals, accountable for their actions, and self-regulated.

All the books helped him in some way or another. Quenton Cassidy was not enthusiastically going about the heady business of breaking world records or capturing some coveted prize; such ideas would have been laughable to him in the bland grind of his daily lifestyle. He was merely trying to slip into a lifestyle that he could live with, strenuous but not unendurable by any means, out of which if the corpuscles and the capillaries and the electrolytes were properly aligned in their own mysterious configurations, he might do even better what he had already done quite well. He was trying to switch gears; at least that is how he thought of it. And though it was a somewhat frightful thing to contemplate for very long, he was really pulling out all the stops. After this he would have no excuses, ever again.

Your power is in aligning with your purpose. If life feels stale, evaluate how you can open a door to a new avenue of your career or business. Something is calling your creativity & spirit. Find out what that is & jump in. That’s where you’ll grow in the most beautiful way!

ADHD and autism show up differently in women because we mask so well. We’ve been whipped so intensely by society to be nice and presentable, that our nature is muted at such a young age and we have no idea (to the tune of as many as 50% to 75% of girls with ADHD are missed).

People act in ways to maximize their self-interest within a company, so create incentives that align employee's objectives with the organization's mission statement. Reward compliance with core values as much as profitability, especially in the face of competitive pressures.

Your version of alignment will be unique to you—and, make no mistake, it will require you to be fully present, engaged, committed, and open to evolution. Maybe, like me, you’ll need to reexamine how, when, where, and with whom you are working within your current business model.

Radical Candor is so often misunderstood is that it’s confused with Ray Dalio’s Radical Transparency. While Dalio and I are very much aligned on the importance of challenging directly, there’s not much focus on care personally in his “manage as someone operating a machine to achieve a goal” philosophy.1 Furthermore, relationships require some privacy, so while I am all for transparency when it comes to business results, I don’t believe that Radical Transparency fosters good working relationships, contributes to psychological safety, or results in a productive, happy culture.

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, “Amen I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody’s target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were coverts drawn from thieves and from prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community—the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the “civic-minded” individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed him and sent Him to His death.

Developing software that delivers true business value is not the same thing as developing ordinary business software. Software that delivers true business value aligns with the business strategic initiatives and bears solutions with clearly identifiable competitive advantage—software that is not about technology, but about the business.

If you imagine big enough, you’ll meet some doubters. If you told your employees that you want to design an electric car that can go 300 miles on a single charge, go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in three seconds flat, seat seven comfortably, and look as sexy as an Aston Martin, somebody will say, “There’s no way.” That tells you you’re on the right track.

There is a correspondence between economic trends and trends in human psychology. The result of this correspondence is a wave function which permeates economic realities with ebbs and flows of economic activity. People who learn to identify the correspondence may then learn to ride the wave by aligning their actions with the ebbs and flows of opportunity.

Is a programmer who gets 99% of assignments done on time and 95% error free better than one who gets only 92% done on time but with a 99% error-free rate? Is total product quality higher if the defect rate is 15% lower but customer returns are 10% higher? Is “strategic alignment” higher if the profit went up by 10% but the “total quality index” went down by 5%?

Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me.

What lubricates the process for us is faith—faith supported by experience—that employees can pursue their self-interest and fulfill the company’s agenda at the same time. If there’s a match or alignment between what we want and what they want, the results will be twofold: While they’re busy satisfying themselves, they’ll satisfy the company’s objectives, too. They succeed, we succeed.

We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts.34 You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. Like the moviegoer who later finds out what she missed in the first half hour, your life will suddenly make more sense. Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment,35 and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

Mass production was aimed at new sources of demand in the early twentieth century’s first mass consumers. Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.”73 Supply and demand were linked effects of the new “conditions of existence” that defined the lives of my great-grandparents Sophie and Max and other travelers in the first modernity. Ford’s invention deepened the reciprocities between capitalism and these populations. In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. The role of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle that had once aligned Google with its users changed dramatically. Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends. Reinvestment in user services became the method for attracting behavioral surplus, and users became the unwitting suppliers of raw material for a larger cycle of revenue generation.

If you have been bold enough in your ideas, this will have two effects: It will attract and repel others. Notice I said it will attract and repel, not or. Your Vivid Vision should behave like a magnet, drawing some people in and pushing others—hopefully not too many—away. If your scope is too small, too milquetoast, or too watered down, or if everyone likes it, no one will love it. If this is the case, you have failed.

A more recent concern relates to “financialization” and associated short-termism. Financialization is the growing importance of norms, metrics, and incentives from the financial sector to the wider economy. Some of the concerns expressed are that, for example, managers are increasingly awarded stock options to align their incentives with those of shareholders; companies are often explicitly managed to increase short-term shareholder value; and financial engineering, such as share buybacks and earnings management, has become a more important part of senior managers’ jobs. The end result is that rather than finance serving business, business serves finance: the tail wags the dog. What John Kay described as “obliquity,” the idea that making money was a consequence of, or a second-order benefit of, serving one’s customers and building good businesses, is driven out (Kay 2010).

The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments have both a financial and an epistemic yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they award wealth to its creators, who have already proved that they can increase it. Their tests yield knowledge because they are falsifiable; they can be exposed as wrong. Businesses are subject to failure.

Why the ancient civilizations who built the place did not use the easier, nearby rocks remains a mystery. But the skills and knowledge on display at Stonehenge are not. The major phases of construction took a total of a few hundred years. Perhaps the preplanning took another hundred or so. You can build anything in half a millennium - I don't care how far you choose to drag your bricks. Furthermore, the astronomy embodied in Stonehenge is not fundamentally deeper than what can be discovered with a stick in the ground. Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what's going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.

If you forget to remind people that getting three years into the future necessitates first getting one year and then two years into it, they will likely overlook that obviousness and assume you’re just nuts. It’s a little bit like telling a thirteen-year-old what it’s going to be like when they turn sixteen. They can’t visualize what being a sixteen-year-old will feel or look like, since it’s too far away from their current world, and the changes they will undergo are too enormous to understand.

Warren Buffet famously said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” On a personal note, I applied this strategy in recent years, and it dramatically improved my happiness. Instead of accepting every offer that came my way, I said no to a bunch of things like public speaking gigs, side projects that were a distraction, people who didn’t add value to my life, and every business opportunity that didn’t perfectly align with my current goals.

Similarly, product managers must be problem solvers as well. They are not trying to design the user experience, or architect a scalable, fault‐tolerant solution. Rather, they solve for constraints aligned around their customer's business, their industry, and especially their own business. Is this something their customers need? Is it substantially better than the alternatives? Is it something the company can effectively market and sell, that they can afford to build, that they can service and support, and that complies with legal and regulatory constraints?

Culture consists of the shared purpose, attitudes, values, goals, practices, behaviors, and habits that define a team or organization. Many coaches focus only on the culture shared by the players, but the fact is that everyone in an organization shapes the culture. To be successful, you need everyone in your organization thinking, believing, talking, and behaving in sync. You need everyone to be aligned with the same beliefs, expectations, behaviors, and habits. Thomas and I learned quickly that the beliefs and behaviors of the past had to go and we needed to instill new ways of thinking and acting that everyone could follow.

billionaire Jeff Hoffman recently spoke at one of the Quantum Leap Mastermind retreats that my business partner, Jon Berghoff, and I cohost, and of the many takeaways that I wrote down, the following stood out most: “You can’t win a gold medal at more than one [sport].” Let that sink in for a minute. Most Olympic athletes spend their entire lives focused on developing themselves to be best in the world at one thing. And remember what we learned in the last chapter, that when you choose and commit to one mission, achieving your other goals will become more probable, because you will be living in alignment with your highest priority.

They dated," Frank says, with just a little too much relish. "For two years. They were the shiniest golden couple of our class. What a match, you know? Both gorgeous. She's super smart--does student government, debate, choir, all that business. He does the sports and volunteers with his dad's church, has those puppy eyes that make you want to buy him a boat--" "Do they?" "Yes, gaze deeply into his eyes next time--you'll feel it." He takes a long draw from his drink and then continues. "Anyway, they were the kind of couple where it's like, separate--they're great. But together, it's . . . star magic." "Star magic?" "From the universe. Celestial bodies aligning and shit. That kind of magic.

I wouldn’t say “art” as much as “virtue,” in the ancient Greek sense of “andreia” – manly action – or “arete,” excellence. In my experience, Resistance kicks in any time we try to move ourselves from a lower plane to a higher. In other words, when we try to align with the better parts of our nature. This move can be creative (art) or physical (athletics) or it can be ethical, moral or spiritual. Have you ever tried to meditate? I have and it kicks my butt every time. Spiritual stuff is hard! But so is making “cold calls” if you’re opening a new business. Somehow the principle is the same. We’re trying to overcome our natural laziness, selfishness, sloppiness, etc. So I wouldn’t say “art,” I’d say “virtue.

asked him to imagine the following: If I selected an employee of the company at random, from any level or function or region, and that employee had an absolutely brilliant idea that would unlock a dramatic new source of growth for the company, how would he or she get it implemented? Does the company have an automatic process for testing a new idea, to see if it is actually any good? And does the company have the management tools necessary to scale this idea up to maximum impact, even if it doesn’t align with any of the company’s current lines of business? That’s what a modern company does: harnesses the creativity and talent of every single one of its employees. Jeff answered me directly: “That’s what your next book should be about.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.

In a world of role-playing personalities, those few people who don't project a mind-made image -- and there are some even on TV, in the media, and the business world -- but function from the deeper core of their Being, those who do not attempt to appear more than they are but are simply themselves, stand out as remarkable and are the only ones who truly make a difference in this world. They are the bringers of the new consciousness. Whatever they do becomes empowered because it is in alignment with the purpose of the whole. Their influence, however, goes far beyond what they do, far beyond their function. Their mere presence -- simple, natural, unassuming -- has a transformational effect on whoever they come into contact with. When you don't play roles, it means there is no self (ego) in what you do. There is no secondary agenda: protection or strengthening of your self. As a result, your actions have far greater power. You are totally focused on the situation. You become one with it. You don't try to be anybody in particular. You are most powerful, most effective, when you are completely yourself. But don't try to be yourself. ... 'How can I be myself?' is, in fact, the wrong question. It implies you have to do something to be yourself. ... If you can be absolutely comfortable with not knowing who you are, then what's left is who you are -- the Being behind the human, a field of pure potentiality rather than something that is already defined. ... Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as a field of conscious Presence.

As people come to understand the environmental damages being caused by carbon and industry pollutants, there is a call for "full-cost accounting." This is an effort to include the adverse environmental costs of manufacturing and other production in the price of producing those items--from the cost of cleanup to the health impacts of carbon pollution. Currently, companies' profit-and-loss statements don't account for these and other costs, which are paid for by us all, and disproportionately by the poor and vulnerable. By failing to pay for the real cost of production, by misrepresenting or ignoring the vast consequences of some of their work, certain businesses and corporations have pursued paths that are at odds with the interests of society. A greater movement toward full-cost accounting is critical if we are going to align business decisions with what is in the best interests of future generations...

I can remember in days gone by the pressure of feeling like I needed to conform to some sort of religious stereotype. You may feel the same way even now, like nobody really understands who you are, what your unique life calling is or how it fits in the body of Christ. The truth is my friend, most of the frustration believers face today when it comes to their calling comes from a place of trying to make it all fit within the four walls of the church. Truth be told, only about 1% of people are really called to vocational ministry within the local church. The rest of us are called to be in the marketplace, releasing the light and life of the Kingdom every day through our unique creative expression. So whether that’s business or art, family or finance you have the divine opportunity to align yourself today with the purposes of the Kingdom, see God start moving through you like never before and watch as the abundance of our Father overtakes you.

Cassandra, I can't marry you and go about business as usual the next day. Newlyweds need privacy." He had a point. But he looked so disgruntled, Cassandra couldn't resist teasing. With a glance of wide-eyed innocence, she asked, "What for?" Tom appeared increasingly flustered as he tried to come up with an explanation. Cassandra waited, gnawing on the inside of her lips. Tom's face changed as he saw the dance of laughter in her eyes. "I'll show you what for," he said, and lunged for her. Cassandra fled with a shriek, skirting nimbly around the table, but he was as fast as a leopard. After snatching her up with ease, he deposited her on the settee, and pounced. She giggled and twisted as the amorous male weight of him lowered over her. The scent of him was clean but salted with sweat, a touch of bay rum cologne sharpened with body warmth. His face was right above hers, a few locks of dark hair tumbling on his forehead. Grinning at her efforts to dislodge him, he braced his forearms on either side of her head. She'd never played with a man like this, and it was incredibly entertaining and fun, and the tiniest bit scary in a way that excited her. Her giggles collapsed slowly, like champagne froth, and she wriggled as if to twist away from him even though she had no intention of doing so. He countered by settling more heavily into the cradle of her hips, pressing her into the cushions. Even through the mass of her skirts, she felt an unfamiliar pressure of his arousal. The thick ridge fit perfectly against the juncture of her thighs, aligning intimately with her in a way that was both embarrassing and stirring. A stab of desire went through her as she realized this was how it would be... the anchoring weight of him, all hard muscle and heat... his eyes heavy-lidded and hot as he stared down at her. Dazedly she reached up and pulled his head to hers. A whimper of pleasure escaped her as he kissed her thoroughly, wringing sensation from her softness, licking deep.

If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest’s patent described it as “a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents” and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcast radio and much else involving the delivery of sound, but the real developments would come from others. De Forest, unfortunately, was forever distracted by business problems. Several companies he founded went bankrupt, twice he was swindled by his backers, and constantly he was in court fighting over money or patents. For these reasons, he didn’t follow through on his invention. Meanwhile, other hopeful inventors demonstrated various sound-and-image systems—Cinematophone, Cameraphone, Synchroscope—but in every case the only really original thing about them was their name. All produced sounds that were faint or muddy, or required impossibly perfect timing on the part of the projectionist. Getting a projector and sound system to run in perfect tandem was basically impossible. Moving pictures were filmed with hand-cranked cameras, which introduced a slight variability in speed that no sound system could adjust to. Projectionists also commonly repaired damaged film by cutting out a few frames and resplicing what remained, which clearly would throw out any recording. Even perfect film sometimes skipped or momentarily stuttered in the projector. All these things confounded synchronization. De Forest came up with the idea of imprinting the sound directly onto the film. That meant that no matter what happened with the film, sound and image would always be perfectly aligned. Failing to find backers in America, he moved to Berlin in the early 1920s and there developed a system that he called Phonofilm. De Forest made his first Phonofilm movie in 1921 and by 1923 he was back in America giving public demonstrations. He filmed Calvin Coolidge making a speech, Eddie Cantor singing, George Bernard Shaw pontificating, and DeWolf Hopper reciting “Casey at the Bat.” By any measure, these were the first talking pictures. However, no Hollywood studio would invest in them. The sound quality still wasn’t ideal, and the recording system couldn’t quite cope with multiple voices and movement of a type necessary for any meaningful dramatic presentation. One invention De Forest couldn’t make use of was his own triode detector tube, because the patents now resided with Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T. Western Electric had been using the triode to develop public address systems for conveying speeches to large crowds or announcements to fans at baseball stadiums and the like. But in the 1920s it occurred to some forgotten engineer at the company that the triode detector could be used to project sound in theaters as well. The upshot was that in 1925 Warner Bros. bought the system from Western Electric and dubbed it Vitaphone. By the time of The Jazz Singer, it had already featured in theatrical presentations several times. Indeed, the Roxy on its opening night in March 1927 played a Vitaphone feature of songs from Carmen sung by Giovanni Martinelli. “His voice burst from the screen with splendid synchronization with the movements of his lips,” marveled the critic Mordaunt Hall in the Times. “It rang through the great theatre as if he had himself been on the stage.

It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women, on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens. But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money, more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring vehicle for suppression.

Onboarding checklists Business orientation checklist As early as possible, get access to publicly available information about financials, products, strategy, and brands. Identify additional sources of information, such as websites and analyst reports. If appropriate for your level, ask the business to assemble a briefing book. If possible, schedule familiarization tours of key facilities before the formal start date. Stakeholder connection checklist Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on. If possible, meet with some stakeholders before the formal start. Take control of your calendar, and schedule early meetings with key stakeholders. Be careful to focus on lateral relationships (peers, others) and not only vertical ones (boss, direct reports). Expectations alignment checklist Understand and engage in business planning and performance management. No matter how well you think you understand what you need to do, schedule a conversation with your boss about expectations in your first week. Have explicit conversations about working styles with bosses and direct reports as early as possible. Cultural adaptation checklist During recruiting, ask questions about the organization’s culture. Schedule conversations with your new boss and HR to discuss work culture, and check back with them regularly. Identify people inside the organization who could serve as culture interpreters. After thirty days, conduct an informal 360-degree check-in with your boss and peers to gauge how adaptation is proceeding.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

Once unbound from the shackles of truth, Fox’s power came from what it decided to cover—its chosen narratives—and what it decided to ignore. Trump’s immature, erratic, and immoral behavior? His sucking up to Putin? His mingling of presidential business and personal profit? Fox talk shows played dumb and targeted the “deep state” instead. Conservative media types were like spiders, spinning webs and trying to catch prey. They insisted the real story was an Obama-led plot against Trump to stop him from winning the election. One night Hannity irrationally exclaimed, “This makes Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore!” Another night he upped the hysteria, insisting this scandal “will make Watergate look like a parking ticket.” The following night he screeched, “This is Watergate times a thousand.” He strung viewers along, invoking mysterious “sources” who were “telling us” that “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” There was always another “iceberg” ahead, always another twist coming, always another Democrat villain to attack after the commercial break. Hannity and Trump were so aligned that, on one weird night in 2018, Hannity had to deny that he was giving Trump a sneak peek at his monologues after the president tweeted out, twelve minutes before air, “Big show tonight on @SeanHannity! 9: 00 P.M. on @FoxNews.” Political reporters fumbled for their remotes and flipped over to Fox en masse. Hannity raved about the “Mueller crime family” and said the Russia investigation was “corrupt” and promoted a guest who said Mueller “surrounded himself with literally a bunch of legal terrorists,” whatever that meant. Some reporters who did not watch Fox regularly were shocked at how unhinged and extreme the content was. But this was just an ordinary night in the pro-Trump alternative universe. Night after night, Hannity said the Mueller probe needed to be stopped immediately, for the good of the country. Trump’s attempts at obstruction flowed directly from his “Executive Time.

For me, that translated into fund-raising. I knew that I could and I would raise any amount of money to get that job done. Fund-raising to end hunger wasn’t just a job or a fad or a political statement for me. It was an expression of my own soulful commitment, and as such, I could only do it in a way that would call on people to reconnect with their own higher calling, or soulful longing, to be the kind of people they wanted to be, the kind of difference they wanted to make, and see how they could express that with their money. So rather than feeling that fund-raising was a matter of twisting arms for a donation or playing on emotions to manipulate money from contributors, it became for me an arena in which I was able to create an opportunity for people to engage in their greatness. It was in this soul-searching dimension of fund-raising, in these intimate conversations, that I discovered deep wounds and conflicts in the way people related to their money. Many people felt they had sold out and become someone they didn’t like anymore. Some were forcing themselves to do work that wasn’t meaningful. Many felt enslaved by their experience of being overtaxed by their government, or felt beaten down by their boss or by the burden of running a family business or employing others. Their relationship with money was dead—or, more accurately, dread—and there was hurt there. There was resentment. There were painful compromises, a kind of rawness. People were bruised and battered there. Not everyone, but many people were very unsettled and uncomfortable and just not their best selves in their relationship with money. They felt little or no freedom with money, no matter how much they had. This lackluster relationship with money wasn’t for lack of expert advice or practical tips. Money-management strategies were plentiful, but the concept of personal transformation was a stranger there. What became clear was that when people were able to align their money with their deepest, most soulful interests and commitments, their relationship with money became a place where profound and lasting transformation could occur.

CONGRUENCE Have you ever felt stuck? Maybe you haven’t recruited anyone in a while, and you just can’t seem to break the streak of no success. This causes you to not feel like picking up the phone and getting any more rejection. You don’t feel like talking about the business that day, so you don’t. Can you relate? This is critical for you to always remember. You cannot avoid rejection. Ninety percent of people are always going to tell you that your business is not for them. You have to go through the no’s to get to the yeses. There is no other way around it. You may not like making calls and accepting no’s, but you will like the results and income you will get by doing it consistently enough. Bank on it. So here’s what happens to everyone, myself included. You have a bad day, where everyone says no. You wake up the next day and you just cannot get yourself to make some calls. The whole day goes by and you did nothing to grow your business. The next day, you have a nagging little feeling of guilt about doing nothing the day before, so you start to internalize it. You question whether you know what you are doing. Does the business work? Is it worth the effort? You know the answer is yes, so you don’t quit — but you also do no activity. The next day, that little guilt feeling has mushroomed even bigger. And as time goes on, the guilt turns into self-loathing. You get down on yourself for not performing like you know you could and should. You begin to beat yourself up and even compare yourself to others. Sadly, this can become a downward spiral that is self-inflicted and hard to break out of. Without being wise enough to seek direct help from an upline expert, some people never recover. Instead of fixing their mindset and bringing their goals and the actions back into alignment — getting congruent — they quit the business. These are the blamers who walk the Earth claiming the business didn’t work. No! They stopped working! Don’t be a blamer. Be congruent. Make your activity match up with your WHY in the business. Pick up the phone and snap back into action. Don’t allow yourself to be depressed, because it is a form of depression. Your upline can help you snap out of it. How

If we truly seek to understand segregationists—not to excuse or absolve them, but to understand them—then we must first understand how they understood themselves. Until now, because of the tendency to focus on the reactionary leaders of massive resistance, segregationists have largely been understood simply as the opposition to the civil rights movement. They have been framed as a group focused solely on suppressing the rights of others, whether that be the larger cause of “civil rights” or any number of individual entitlements, such as the rights of blacks to vote, assemble, speak, protest, or own property. Segregationists, of course, did stand against those things, and often with bloody and brutal consequences. But, like all people, they did not think of themselves in terms of what they opposed but rather in terms of what they supported. The conventional wisdom has held that they were only fighting against the rights of others. But, in their own minds, segregationists were instead fighting for rights of their own—such as the “right” to select their neighbors, their employees, and their children’s classmates, the “right” to do as they pleased with their private property and personal businesses, and, perhaps most important, the “right” to remain free from what they saw as dangerous encroachments by the federal government. To be sure, all of these positive “rights” were grounded in a negative system of discrimination and racism. In the minds of segregationists, however, such rights existed all the same. Indeed, from their perspective, it was clearly they who defended individual freedom, while the “so-called civil rights activists” aligned themselves with a powerful central state, demanded increased governmental regulation of local affairs, and waged a sustained assault on the individual economic, social, and political prerogatives of others. The true goal of desegregation, these white southerners insisted, was not to end the system of racial oppression in the South, but to install a new system that oppressed them instead. As this study demonstrates, southern whites fundamentally understood their support of segregation as a defense of their own liberties, rather than a denial of others’.

But that is a lie! Here we have been breaking our backs for years at All-Union hard labor. Here in slow annual spirals we have been climbing up to an understanding of life—and from this height it can all be seen so clearly: It is not the result that counts! It is not the result—but the spirit! Not what—but how. Not what has been attained—but at what price. And so it is with us the prisoners—if it is the result which counts, then it is also true that one must survive at any price. And what that means is: One must become a stool pigeon, betray one’s comrades. And thereby get oneself set up comfortably. And perhaps even get time off sentence. In the light of the Infallible Teaching there is, evidently, nothing reprehensible in this. After all, if one does that, then the result will be in our favor, and the result is what counts. No one is going to argue. It is pleasant to win. But not at the price of losing one’s human countenance. If it is the result which counts—you must strain every nerve and sinew to avoid general work. You must bend down, be servile, act meanly—yet hang on to your position as a trusty. And by this means . . . survive. If it is the essence that counts, then the time has come to reconcile yourself to general work. To tatters. To torn skin on the hands. To a piece of bread which is smaller and worse. And perhaps . . . to death. But while you’re alive, you drag your way along proudly with an aching back. And that is when—when you have ceased to be afraid of threats and are not chasing after rewards—you become the most dangerous character in the owllike view of the bosses. Because . . . what hold do they have on you? You even begin to like carrying hand barrows with rubbish (yes, but not with stone!) and discussing with your work mate how the movies influence literature. You begin to like sitting down on the empty cement mixing trough and lighting up a smoke next to your bricklaying. And you are actually and simply proud if, when the foreman passes you, he squints at your courses, checks their alignment with the rest of the wall, and says: “Did you lay that? Good line.” You need that wall like you need a hole in the head, nor do you believe it is going to bring closer the happy future of the people, but, pitiful tattered slave that you are, you smile at this creation of your own hands. The Anarchist’s daughter, Galya Venediktova, worked as a nurse in the Medical Section, but when she saw that what went on there was not healing but only the business of getting fixed up in a good spot—out of stubbornness she left and went off to general work, taking up a spade and a sledge hammer. And she says that this saved her spiritually. For a good person even a crust is healthy food, and to an evil person even meat brings no benefit.